


The First Christmas

by the_wordbutler



Series: Motion Practice [21]
Category: Marvel (Comics), Spider-Man (Comicverse), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Holidays, Legal Drama, M/M, motion practice universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-20
Updated: 2013-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-05 05:56:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1090407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_wordbutler/pseuds/the_wordbutler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>December 25 is crisp and cold, but the sun is shining and the sky promises to be blue.</p>
<p>December 25 is also Bruce’s first Christmas with Tony and Miles, and he discovers quickly that there’s a lot about that worth celebrating.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The First Christmas

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place immediately after “Permanency,” or as I like to call it “the week after Tony and Bruce got married.” 
> 
> This is my second Christmas with Jen as my beta. She is the gift that keeps on giving. And while it is only the first Christmas with saranoh also in the position, well, she's pretty great, too.

December 25 is crisp and wintry when Bruce slowly drifts awake, the sun just cresting the horizon and stretching its first fingers of light out into the world. He tries to shift in bed to watch the sky change colors—from pink to gold to a promised, brilliant blue—but the arms around his waist tighten and pull him back. When he attempts to glance over his shoulder, Tony clings to him like a limpet, tangling their legs under the covers and pressing his face into the back of Bruce’s shoulder. Bruce inhales softly at the rasp of Tony’s goatee against his bare skin and the heat that radiates through his belly.

“No moving ‘til the kid’s up,” he grumbles against Bruce’s shoulder blade.

Bruce chuckles. “You don’t want to enjoy Christmas morning?”

“I plan on enjoying it by falling back asleep with the guy who’s contractually obligated to stay in bed with me until I’m ready to get up.” Bruce starts to laugh again, but the sound dies when one of Tony’s hands starts snaking up his chest. His fingers and palm are calloused from years of impromptu home improvement and tinkering in the garage, and Bruce worries for a moment that he’ll spend the rest of his life being driven to distraction by Tony’s rough hands slipping across his skin. “Look up the bed thing,” Tony says as his fingers spread over the middle of Bruce’s chest and sink into the hair there. “It’s in our vows.”

“It’s not.”

“Mmm, see, I think you’re wrong,” Tony replies, but his voice is already a mumble against his shoulder. Bruce isn’t surprised when, less than a minute later, his breathing evens out in sleep.

Bruce closes his eyes again and tries to doze, but with the sun filtering in through the curtains and Tony holding him almost too close for real comfort, he knows sleep won’t return. As it stands, they’d fallen asleep on the couch at eleven p.m. after they’d prepped a few dishes for dinner the next night and set the presents out under the tree. Miles’d tried to stay with them, complaining that being sent to his room on Christmas Eve was “lame,” but Tony’d physically nudged him up the stairs. “Santa won’t come for twelve-year-olds who don’t let their foster parents make out on the couch,” he’d insisted, and Bruce’d grinned at Miles’s huffy pre-teen eye roll.

They’d splashed whisky into eggnog and sat together after that, enjoying the glow of the Christmas tree and, if Bruce is honest with himself, the glow of one another. He’d fought with the warmth in his stomach and chest for a good half-hour, attempting futilely to form emotions into words, but every time he’d glanced over at Tony and caught his little smile, his thoughts had scattered like snowflakes on the wind.

But he’d let Tony tug him across the couch and against his side, and he’d drifted off with his face pressed to Tony’s sweatshirt and Tony’s scent surrounding him. Somehow, that said more than a litany of clumsy words ever could. 

Bruce is inches from reconsidering what words he’d use—somehow, _I love you_ feels insufficient to describe the last few weeks—when there’s a knock at the bedroom door. 

Tony grunts and shoves his face back against Bruce’s skin. “We’re not home,” he grumbles.

Bruce smiles and shakes his head. “You realize that, by virtue of the fact we’re in your bedroom, we’re—”

“Are you seriously lawyering me right now, Banner? Because I’m trying to enjoy this thing called ‘sleep,’ and you are ruining that with your pedantic, big-brained—”

“You know you can’t pretend you’re asleep if I can hear you talking, right?” Miles asks as the door creeps open a few inches. Tony groans and tries to hide behind Bruce; when Bruce shoves him away lightly, he rolls onto his stomach and buries himself in the covers. In the doorway, Miles rolls his eyes. “That doesn’t work when I need to go to school,” he points out.

“You’re twelve and there are truancy laws,” Tony’s muffled voice announces from under his cocoon. When Bruce tries to lift the corner of the comforter, he pulls it back down. “Go back to bed.”

Miles crosses his arms. “It’s seven-thirty, and you made me go to bed at ten last night.”

“Because we needed to make out.”

“We didn’t make out,” Bruce says, because Miles is seconds away from pulling a disgusted teenage face and flouncing out of the room. “And we’ll come downstairs in a few minutes.”

The lump of sheets that purports to be Tony Stark snorts. “In an hour.”

“You have ten minutes before I start poking around whatever you put under the tree,” Miles warns, and he leaves the bedroom door open as heads down the hallway. 

Tony’s head immediately flies out of the covers, complete with wild eyes and wilder bedhead. “Santa doesn’t come for kids who shake their presents!” he shouts through the open door. Bruce twists his head to hide his laugh in the pillow.

“Good thing I know there’s no such thing!” Miles yells back, and Bruce only discovers how obvious his laughing is when Tony leans over and nips his shoulder. He squeaks and turns his head in protest, but then Tony crowds into his personal space and they’re kissing, limbs tangling together in Tony’s expensive sheets. Tony smells like heat and spice, like the one thing Bruce’s always wanted and never could have, and Bruce shifts to card fingers through his hair and drag him down until they’re pressed together. They explore each other, their hands roaming and their kiss stretching until it almost snaps, and when they break apart, Bruce keeps Tony close enough that their foreheads press together.

“Kid’s awake,” Tony mumbles, close enough to Bruce’s mouth that it might as well be another kiss. “I think you have a rule about hand stuff when the kid’s awake.”

“Only because it never stops at hand stuff,” Bruce points out.

“Yeah, and this definitely wouldn’t,” Tony replies, and his voice is so heavy with promise that Bruce actually physically pushes him away before he decides to break his own rules. Tony sprawls back on the sheets, laughing, and against his better judgment, Bruce laughs, too. “Marrying you was maybe the best idea I’ve ever had,” he decides, breathless and grinning.

“You say that this week,” Bruce returns, and Tony pinches him just above his hip before he rolls out of bed. 

They find shirts to go with their pajama pants—Tony in a soft, threadbare t-shirt from his MIT days, Bruce in a fleecy long-sleeved one that Tony runs his fingers all over before they make it out of the bedroom—and head downstairs. Miles has already turned on the Christmas lights and, more importantly, the coffee pot, and Tony drags himself into the kitchen with single-minded determination. Outside, the dogs chase one another around in the yard, barking at shadows.

Miles, however, waits for them in one of the big chairs in the living room. Despite the mounds of gifts under the tree, most of which Bruce’d encouraged Tony to _return_ , the only presents on the coffee table are messily-wrapped ones with haphazard bows. Bruce tilts his head at them and suppresses a smile. “I’m surprised you didn’t start without us.”

Miles shakes his head a little. For all his bluster upstairs, he looks suddenly embarrassed; he rubs his socked feet together, then tucks them up on the chair to sit cross-legged. “I figured Tony’d yell. At least, more than usual.”

Bruce snorts a laugh. “I’d like to think the Christmas spirit would win out over the yelling.”

“And that, big guy, is where you’re wrong, because ruining Christmas morning is totally a yell-worthy offense.” Before Bruce can respond, Tony molds himself to his back and presses a warm kiss to the nape of his neck. “Coffee,” he mutters, and Bruce accepts Tony’s House Stark mug before he spills all over both of them.

“Is today going to be a parade of PDA?” Miles demands, but he hardly hides his grin.

“The first Christmas after you get married, I’m going to sit on your chair and complain about the exact same thing,” Tony shoots right back. He pulls away from Bruce, intent on flopping down on the couch and, presumably, bossing the rest of them around, but he stops when he notices the two gifts on the table. “Okay, I know I did a lot of wrapping and a lot of paying Girl Scouts at the mall to wrap for me, but I don’t recognize these.”

Miles frowns at the uneven green wrapping paper. “You can pay people to wrap for you?”

“Sure,” Tony says with a shrug. He tangles his fingers in Bruce’s waistband and starts pulling both of them toward the couch. “Cute little pigtailed Fruit Tarts—”

“Brownies,” Bruce corrects.

“—raising money for their spring camping trip or something. Fun fact: the second you start parenting a kid, all the other parents assume you want to swap stories.”

He plops down on the couch, dragging Bruce down with him. Bruce tips away to keep from spilling coffee all over the two of them, and ends up at an awkward angle with one of his legs halfway on Tony’s lap. Tony immediately gropes his thigh, and Bruce rolls his eyes when he realizes that he planned it. “He’s leaving out the part of the story where he spent an hour telling the troop leader about your science project ideas,” Bruce says as he frees his leg from Tony’s grip.

Miles blinks at the two of them, but his eyes linger on Tony. “Really?”

“Really, though the big guy’s a spoil-sport for telling you.” Bruce shakes his head at the nickname before he hides his smile in a sip of his coffee. Tony, on the other hand, leans forward toward the gifts on the table. “So, seriously, did you rob a little old lady and make off with her hand-crocheted doilies?”

“ _No_ ,” Miles immediately answers. He tips his head like he’s embarrassed before shoving one of the gifts a few inches down the table, closer to Bruce. “But, uh, when I went to the mall with Ganke, he gave me some of his allowance so I could buy you guys Christmas presents. And then Steve brought me some wrapping paper. So.” He scrubs a hand over his head and steals a shy look in Bruce’s direction. “Merry Christmas.”

“Okay, if I knew having a kid meant _I_ got presents, too, we would’ve done this years ago,” Tony announces, abandoning his coffee. Miles finally cracks a tiny smile as he watches Tony fight against the tape, swear, and turn the package around to try opening it from the other side; the tiny smile turns into a grin once the paper’s peeled back, because Tony’s laughing. “I tell you that the piddly little pull-back motor in the Lego car’s a joke and not worth your time, so you go out and buy the Lego car?” he demands, and Bruce can see for the first time that Tony’s gift is a bright red Lego technic racer.

“You told me that if you had ten minutes with it, you could make it faster than the dogs,” Miles retorts, beaming nearly from one ear to the other. “I wanted to see if you could do it.”

Tony spends all of six seconds squinting at the box before he declares, “It’ll be done before the turkey tonight.”

“You own greyhounds,” Bruce reminds him, but he knows his own smile betrays him.

“Greyhounds that’re going to be beaten by a Lego car before Dot’s through saying grace at dinner,” Tony retorts, and flips the box over to look at the picture on the _other_ side.

Bruce snorts a laugh at him and shakes his head before he, too, puts down his coffee to reach for his gift. Miles’s bright-as-day grin falters a little and becomes nervous as he watches Bruce pick at the tape; when Tony finally stops shaking the Lego box to glance over, all that’s left of the boy’s smile is a little twitch at the corner of his mouth. 

Unlike Tony’s single box of Legos, Bruce’s gift is two things taped together: a copy of the book _Behind the Beautiful Forevers_ , and something flat that Miles (or someone else) has wrapped in tissue paper. “Tony, uh, said you went to India and did all this stuff there when you were in college,” Miles explains. Bruce is familiar with the book—he saw the author on a talk show once, discussing her time in the forgotten corners of Mumbai—but he always passed by it in the bookstore, afraid to drag up the memories that’d brought him to India in the first place. “And I wanted to get just a book about India, but then Ganke talked to the lady at the bookstore, and she said this one’s famous. So.”

He shrugs a little, looking down at his hands, and Bruce stands on his urge to leave the book on the couch and wrap the boy up in a hug. They’re not quite ready for easy physical contact yet, and he’s not sure this Christmas is the right time to push that. “I’ve thought about buying this book a hundred times,” he admits, and Miles jerks his head up in surprise. When Bruce smiles at him, he smiles back twice as bright. “It’s perfect.”

“Well, and there’s the other thing,” Miles points out, nodding at the item in tissue paper. “It’s for both of you, though. Steve helped.”

“If Steve helped, I’m not sure I _want_ it,” Tony decides, but all the playful venom drains from his voice once Bruce’s pealed the paper away.

Because inside a plain black picture frame is a photo of the two of them, Tony’s hand slung low on Bruce’s hip and the two of them grinning. Bruce knows without thinking that it’s one of the dozens of pictures Steve took in Judge Smithe’s courtroom only ten days earlier.

One of their wedding pictures.

“Steve’s bringing the rest when they come over tonight,” Miles explains while Bruce stares at the photo, studying the blur of Natasha’s red hair somewhere in the dim background and the curve of Miles’s smile where he stands almost out of frame. “But he let me pick one to give you.”

“When’d you even get around to colluding with him on this?” Tony asks after a few more seconds of surprised silence, head still tipped toward the picture.

“The day after your wedding,” Miles answers. When they both turn to look at him, he shrugs. “You were kind of late coming to get me for school.”

“We weren’t _late_ ,” Tony immediately protests, raising his hands, “we were just—”

“We were late, Tony,” Bruce corrects him, but he can’t really stop smiling.

Tony looks ready to protest, but the phone starts ringing. The talking caller ID in the kitchen announces that it’s Steve on the other line, and Tony groans before dragging himself up off the couch. “Family group hug and appropriate gratitude after I deal with Jingle Bell Rogers’s meltdown,” he promises, and rubs Miles’s head as he passes. Miles bats at him, but he’s grinning.

The warmth that blooms in Bruce’s stomach this time is an entirely different one from what he felt upstairs, sprawled in Tony’s bed and surrounded by Tony’s heat, and he can’t help himself; as soon as Tony’s picking up the phone and walking out onto the deck with it, greeting Steve and the dogs all at once, Bruce stands from the couch. He opens an arm, and without any other prompting, Miles rockets off the chair and meets him halfway.

If he minds the tight hug, he says absolutely nothing. But Bruce also thinks that the tighter he pulls Miles against him, the harder Miles holds on.

“Thank you,” he says quietly after the boy finally pulls away. He tries to hold his face steady and impassive, but it’s hard to ignore the tiny tics of sorrow that creep into his expression. Bruce wants to smooth all of them away, to hold Miles until he’s safe and warm with the two of them, but he knows there’s a long road between today and wherever they’re meant to end up. For now, then, he rubs a hand along Miles’s shoulder and watches the sorrow fade into a small smile. “This— It means a lot to Tony and me.”

“I should mostly thank you, I think,” Miles responds, and this time, Bruce doesn’t hesitate to gather him up and hug him again.

“Hogging kid-hugs is incredibly unfair and not conducive to marital bliss,” Tony declares from behind them, and Miles bursts out laughing as he pulls away from Bruce. He tries to duck out of Tony’s hug, but Tony’s too fast for him, and the end result is a combination hug and pratfall onto the big chair. “Steve says they’re bringing yams and something else in a casserole dish,” he says as Miles squirms out of his grip and onto the floor. “I don’t know, I stopped listening because I noticed that there was adorable hugging going on inside my house.”

The dogs pretty much pounce on Miles, capering around him and licking his face, and Bruce rolls his eyes as he calls them off. “I think you make life intentionally difficult, sometimes,” he comments. 

“And yet you married me anyway,” Tony returns, twisting so he can grab his coffee off the end table. He sprawls across the chair like a man half his age and tips his head toward Miles. “So, are you opening these Christmas presents or what? Because the way I see it, if we’re just spending today like any other morning, Bruce and I will just go upstairs and—”

“Definitely opening presents!” Miles declares, practically diving for the pile under the tree.

Bruce shakes his head as he settles back onto the couch, but once he’s picked up his coffee mug, he realizes that Tony’s staring at him from his spot on the chair. He smiles, slow and easy, and for a moment, Bruce forgets how to breathe. It’s that smile, warmer than a bonfire, that caused him to fall in love with Tony, and he wonders for a second if he’ll spend the rest of his life falling back in love with him every time he smiles.

“God, you guys are _mushy_ on Christmas,” Miles grumbles, halfway through opening what Bruce suspects is one of several video games under the tree.

Tony stretches a foot out to try and nudge his head, but he ducks out of the way. “You can complain about it next Christmas,” he retorts, and flashes Bruce one more smile before they officially start to supervise the gift-opening.

**Author's Note:**

> Tony and Bruce's anniversary was December 16. I wrote a little ficlet about it, which you can find [here](http://the-wordbutler.tumblr.com/post/70245175253/happy-anniversary-bruce-tony).


End file.
